Operation Flashpoint: Red River

Posted: 06/16/11

Few contemporary games attempt to recreate the experience of real-world military combat quite like Operation Flashpoint, and the heavy emphasis on tactical play, teamwork, and unforgiving realism found in the series' latest installment, Red River, provides a welcome alternative to today's glut of more forgiving shooters. Does its continued, single-minded focus on realism render it a hit or a misfire?

The year is 2013, and you start out at an American base in Afghanistan where the Marines are hot on the trail of the world's most dangerous new terrorist organization. That trail quickly leads them into neighboring Tajikistan, where a relatively simple retaliation campaign erupts into a heated conflict involving the full wrath of the Chinese People's Liberation Army.

While Red River does an adequate job of conveying the scale of these potentially world-shattering operations, the action remains appropriately human as seen through the eyes of Fireteam Bravo and its four marines. As the fireteam's leader, you can play as a rifleman, an auto-rifleman, a grenadier, or a scout, though the game's focus on long-distance fights mean you'll likely find yourself preferring the scout's high-powered sniper rifle. Once you've completed several missions, you can also add points to a number of helpful skills and unlock new weaponry to aid you on the front.

But as the game makes clear, lone wolves often die alone. To survive the unforgiving wastes of Tajikistan, you'll need to make full use of your three fellow squad members via the tactical interface. While mastering the system takes some practice, you'll soon finding yourself giving flanking orders to specific team members with ease, and calling for suppression fire in the roughest circumstances.

If only your men listened to those orders. Red River suffers from some comically inefficient friendly AI at times, which can quickly turn a manageable mission into a massacre. Order your men to form a defensive position, for instance, and you'll occasionally see them make a suicidal run out into open ground instead of taking cover behind nearby walls. Order them to secure a building several meters ahead, and it's possible that they'll simply stand around enjoying the scenery. Worse yet, on the few occasions when a daring rush into open ground is unavoidable, they'll sometimes blatantly ignore your command to follow you into the jaws of hell. Oddly enough, on the other hand, the enemies almost always feel intelligent and deadly.

Toss the friendly AI out of the equation and enlist three friends for the cooperative campaign mode, however, and Red River makes great strides toward becoming the ultra-realistic tactical shooter it desires so much to be. Cumbersome activities such as placing mines suddenly become easy with the help of friends in the right roles, as does checking nearby buildings for insurgents. In fact, it's best to play the cooperative mode on the harder difficulties, which remove the game's already sparse checkpoints and enemy identifiers. Stripped of all visual targeting and directional aids, Red River's harder modes provide a harrowing military experience where deadly threats wait in every shadow and friendly fire becomes a constant possibility. There are no competitive multiplayer options here, but the option to play a series of short, focused Fireteam Engagement missions online does much to fill the gap.

One of the hallmarks of the Operation Flashpoint games are their lifelike deadliness, so you should never expect to storm into battle and survive a hail of bullets. As in Dragon Rising, a single bullet to the head is enough to bring you down for good, and a single shot elsewhere on your body will cause you to bleed to death until you patch yourself up, or, in the worst cases, call for someone else to help you. You'll also need to play doctor on your squad members several times per mission, since the faulty AI means that they'll frequently be on the ground.

Red River's dedication to realism also extends to the long lulls between combat operations as soldiers ride from one battlefield to another in humvees or helicopters. It works well in the early stages, but these tedious rides across Tajikistan become all but intolerable by the third act. These respites extend even to the gameplay, since you'll spend long periods of time in every mission jogging through empty prairies without incident. It's tempting to view the downtime as dead-time, but the occasional surprise shot from a sniper always serves to remind you that it's never wise to let down your guard in hostile territory.

It's not uncommon to spend almost an hour on a series of objectives thanks to Red River's lengthy missions. Checkpoints are few and far between even on the normal mode, which means that you'll have to start a long battle sequence from the beginning if you foolishly step out into enemy fire. It's a design decision that consistently keeps you on your toes, and the game's unrelenting emphasis on tactical combat ensures that every attempt could be vastly different from the last.

Red River's presentation is at its best during the humorous and informative opening cinematic and the mission briefings that precede your long rides across the Tajikistani landscape. The visuals in the game itself, however, are merely passable. While the individual character and weapon models are occasionally striking in their detail, the sprawling landscape often looks more like an impressionistic painting that seems out of place despite occasional scenes of striking beauty. This environmental inadequacy extends to the many buildings you'll encounter, since their bare interiors give the unsettling impression of being on a deserted movie set.

Red River is rarely quiet thanks to a never-ending tough-guy monologue by one Staff Sergeant Knox, who prattles on for hours throughout the campaign. Knox's ramblings initially provide an entertaining way of relating the game's basics, but you soon find yourself wondering how Knox manages to survive in spite of his seeming inability to stop talking for more than thirty seconds. By the end of the game, it's hard not to find his foul-mouthed musings murderously annoying, particularly since they're always used to fill the silence that accompanies your transportation to the next mission.

Operation Flashpoint: Red River's challenging tactical gameplay provides a unique and satisfying experience despite its flaws. Yet these flaws all but vanish into the background in the game's rewarding cooperative modes, and players who can recruit a loyal group of soldiers to fill a dedicated cooperative fireteam will find a uniquely rewarding challenge in the distant mountains of Tajikistan.

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